Racial Discrimination in Access to Justice: Evidence from Brazil

Abstract

In Brazil, young Black males are far more likely to experience criminal violence (e.g., homicide, police lethality and assault) than young White males. However, race might also affect the ex-post scenario; that is, Blacks and Whites may go to the police seeking solutions against criminal violence with different probabilities. In this paper, we identified and quantified the sources of the racial differential in accessing justice between Blacks and Whites in Brazil. Using microdata from the Brazilian Household Survey, we used the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to isolate the discriminatory component from social indicators correlated with access to justice. We found that structural attributes explain only part (around 60%) of the racial differential in accessing justice. A significant portion of the discrepancy (at least 40%) provides evidence of racial discrimination. In addition, the spatial dynamics revealed that the Northeast region of Brazil presents the most discriminatory scenario in the country, a region historically characterised by higher social inequalities and violent mortality.